A story published today by Vice exposes the scale of bullying, abuse and sexual assault in British armed forces training, with the youngest recruits, and especially young women, some of the worst impacted. One of the veterans speaking out in the article is Joe, who joined the Army Foundation College in 2013 aged 16. Read his full story here. [Content warning: descriptions of abuse and sexual assault].

In a story published by Vice today [content warning: descriptions of abuse and sexual assault], former recruits - including some who were enlisted as children - speak out about the bullying, abuse and sexual assault they experienced in armed forces training. Recruits aged under 18, particularly young women, are disproportionately impacted by these human rights abuses.

One of the people who bravely shared their experience for the story is Joe, who joined the Army Foundation College aged 16 in 2013. He told CRIN of the treatment he and other recruits experienced there:

‘One corporal is ok, all the rest are cold and uncaring, or worse. If you ask for help, it’s “Piss off, you,” or “Shut the f*** up.” There’s no sign they know how to work with 16-year-old children recruited into the army. They didn’t have to touch you to abuse you. [One] time, they announce a tattoo check. We’re ordered to strip to our underwear... then to pull up our pants so they can see everything but our genitals. The corporal walks down the line... and he tells me, as I’m almost naked, what he thinks of my body... He just makes fun of my body in front of the entire platoon. It breaks my heart that Ofsted has graded the place ‘outstanding’ for welfare...The truth is that the friends I met in that place were broken by it. It gave them PTSD, and me as well. Harrogate is dangerous but a recruit can’t just say that to a visitor - it’s too risky’

Read Joe’s full story below.

The article reveals:

• In 2021 alone, military police opened investigations into sexual offences against 22 recruits at the Army Foundation College (AFC), the army’s dedicated training institution for under-18s. In one case the suspects were three members of AFC staff.

• More than one in ten girls serving in the armed forces were victims of a sexual offence in 2021, according to records of military police investigations. Girls aged under 18 were ten times as likely as adult female personnel to be the victim of a sexual offence last year.

• Between 2014 and 2020, there were 62 complaints of violence by AFC staff against recruits aged under 18. Eleven members of staff were found guilty of wrongdoing; a small number of whom were allowed to continue working at AFC following the investigation. Despite being made aware of this record of abuse, Ofsted renewed AFC’s ‘Outstanding’ grade for duty of care and welfare in 2021.

• Victims of abuse in armed forces training, including recruits who are legally still children, are being denied access to justice. The Government has resisted numerous recommendations to take responsibility for investigating and prosecuting serious crimes - including sexual assault and child abuse - from the military police and justice system.

In the face of this further evidence that armed forces training is unsafe for under-18s, we repeat our calls for the UK Government to close the Army Foundation College - which has a long record of alleged and proven abuse by its staff - and to raise the minimum enlistment age to 18 in law.

If you want to find out more about this issue:

• Read more testimonies, from parents of former recruits.

• Read CRIN’s two-page briefing on welfare concerns for under-18s in armed forces training, and especially at the Army Foundation College.

• You can find more information about CRIN’s campaign to end recruitment of under-18s by the British armed forces here. Our two-page paper - Why raising the recruitment age would benefit everyone - is a good introduction.

Joe’s story

Joe joined the Army Foundation College at Harrogate in September 2013, aged 16.

“It’s a teacher who first suggests I join the army. I’m 15 and want to get away from home so I check out the website of the Army Foundation College. It looks clean, well-regulated, as if Ofsted practically lives there, so I go with my dad to the recruitment office. The recruiters are friendly, charismatic, though vague. There’s no conversation about the contract or what the army’s actually like. They don’t make any effort to support me, as a 15-year-old child, to make a genuine choice with informed consent.

Dad warns me that joining the army could cost me my life, but I’m 15 - I can’t really have that kind of ethical conversation yet so I just nod, ‘Yeah, I get it.’ He supports me anyway but he’s keen that I don’t pick a combat job. I want to join the intelligence corps but you can only go to Harrogate for the more basic jobs like infantry, artillery, logistics. I’m accepted for logistics, but when the army calls, they say there are no jobs in that corps at the moment and I’ll be joining the artillery instead. I don’t know what the artillery do (it’s a combat job) but they say they need an answer that day and I say OK.

When dad and I arrive at Harrogate for the first day of training it all starts to feel real for the first time. The gym is full of children like me waiting to enlist and nobody’s saying a word - there’s a lot of fear in the room. When it’s my turn, the corporal puts the contract on the table - this is the very first time I’ve seen it. I don’t have time to read it - the corporal just points at the bottom of the form like I’m signing for an Amazon package: ‘Just sign here.’ So I sign. (If I’m honest, all the time I was in the army I never knew the terms of the contract I was on.)

After we’re enlisted, the colonel gives a presentation and his last slide says we have two minutes to say goodbye. Two minutes. The parents are crying and us kids are kind of shell-shocked. I hug my dad but I can’t look at him, then the colonel says it’s time to go. That night they let us have a five-minute phone call, then they take our phones off us and send us to bed. I’m lying there looking at the ceiling tiles, wondering, ‘What the f*** have I done?’ I can hear other recruits crying in their beds. That first night is rough as hell. Then bang, the door opens, it’s 6.30am and the corporal’s telling us to get up.

They keep us controlled all the time: ‘You’re going to lunch, you’re going back, okay now it’s bed.’ It’s all clockwork. Or there’s a line on the floor all the way down the hallway and they’ll shout, ‘Everybody on the line!’ And they’ll just leave you standing there for an hour doing nothing.

One corporal is ok, all the rest are cold and uncaring, or worse. They can see we’re new and we’re scared, but if you ask for help, it’s ‘Piss off, you,’ or ‘Shut the f*** up.’ It’s like they’re just pulled out of their regiments - there’s no sign they know how to work with 16-year-old children recruited into the army. A decent person would try to talk to you, ‘How are we feeling, gents - yeah, it’s hard isn’t it, right?’ But not these guys. I’d say the staff at Harrogate fall into three categories. The first is psychopathic. The second is just cold. The third is the good guy who’s being tough for show. 

And some of them are just foul, like this one physical training instructor who’s an animal to us. First time we meet him, he puts us all in the press-up position apart from this one kid he doesn’t like. He makes that kid say, ‘Raise, lower, raise, lower…’ It’s to turn us against that recruit, make us resent him. The corporal knows that when we’re all back together and the lights are turned off, things will happen, and they do, and they encourage that, the corporals.

See the thing is, they didn’t have to touch you to abuse you. For instance, a corporal would hold up a bin with just one thing in it. He knows none of us have put in there but he walks up to someone he doesn’t like and goes, ‘You put that there, didn’t you?’ ‘No Corporal,’ ‘Press up, position down. Let’s try this again. You put this in the bin, didn’t you?’ ‘No Corporal.’ And that goes on until you say, ‘Yes Corporal,’ and you’re released. It’s all to humiliate the recruits in front of each other.

Another time, they announce a tattoo check. We’re ordered to strip to our underwear and stand on the line, then to pull up our pants so they can see everything but our genitals. The corporal walks down the line bantering with those he likes and then he comes to me. And he tells me, as I’m almost naked, what he thinks of my body. He starts from my head and he goes down, and he laughs. He just makes fun of my body in front of the entire platoon. What a man.

Also, not many people know that they gas us - they put us in a small room and fill it with tear gas and tell you to get your mask on quickly so you don’t breathe it in. Which is exactly what happens to me. I start choking, the gas trapped inside my mask is burning my face and I’m suffocating. I panic. When I reach for the corporal for help he shoves me off, and when I feel for the door he drags me back. When I do get out I’m crawling on the ground, my ears and eyes are still burning, and when I finally manage to rip the mask off, I’m in pieces. I lie on the ground crying. Just a bit of ‘Are you alright?’ from the corporal would be good, but he can’t stop laughing at me.

This isn’t the public image of Harrogate, of course, because they fake that. One time, some visitors have arrived and the corporals make us wait by the obstacle course until these guests come round the corner. Then we’re all told to work like a team to impress them. It’s a stunt. We’re not being thrashed that day, of course - if civilians or TV cameras come into an army camp, you’ll have the best food of your life and you’ll get a completely different experience from normal. It’s all a performance, though. Like when we’re told to fill out a survey about our experience of training and there’s a question about whether I feel safe and I’ve answered ‘No’, but the company sergeant major is watching - he comes to read my screen and I change my answer and he walks away. 

So it breaks my heart that Ofsted has graded the place ‘outstanding’ for welfare. Apparently, Ofsted talk to recruits, but if they’d asked me, I wouldn’t have told them the truth - because the people I’d be talking about literally have the power to put me in prison. The truth is that the friends I met in that place were broken by it. It gave them PTSD, and me as well. Harrogate is dangerous but a recruit can’t just say that to a visitor - it’s too risky.

I’d have gone home - I wanted to - but in the first six weeks you don’t have a right of discharge. This ‘college’ can literally put you in prison if you leave it - we’re not students, we’re soldiers. Even leaving the camp gets you arrested. [Note: any recruit who tries to leave in the first six weeks is charged as Absent Without Leave and arrested.] And at the end of the six weeks, we’re all told that our right of discharge has come to an end, which is actually the opposite of the truth. So even when I do have a right to leave, I’ve been told that I don’t. 

And as for the education at this ‘college’, you do very basic Functional Skills courses in English, maths, and ICT - that’s the most that a recruit can walk out the door with. Compare that with going to a real college at 16 and studying for qualifications that offer a real pathway to university. It just baffles me that Harrogate can be considered a college at all. Education isn’t taken seriously - they even postponed our exams because on the day the drill shed needed sweeping!

Sometime after the first six weeks, our platoon starts to fall apart. It all starts with a conversation in the scoffhouse on the subject of killing people. Most of the recruits are like, ‘Sure, I’ll kill people,’ or, ‘I can’t wait to get a kill.’ All kinds of things are coming out of people’s mouths - bear in mind that we’re only 16 or 17. But I haven’t joined up to kill people - I’m not psychotic. So I say, ‘I don’t want to kill people, but I accept that I might have to.’ And that turns most of the platoon against me. 

The truth is, though, that I joined up to get away from home, as did most of the recruits. In the year I was there, I could count on my two hands the people who had passionately wanted to join the British army - out of maybe 600 recruits.

But escaping from home just isn’t a good reason to be in the army. For the few who come out reinvented, great, but it’s a tiny minority, absolutely tiny. Of the rest, some quit, some just get on with it, and some are left traumatised. It’s a very dangerous policy because you’re attracting all kinds of people who don’t want to be there, and they’re leaving more damaged than when they went in. That’s exactly what happened to me and most of my friends.

Meanwhile, the recruits are looking for fights more and more. There’s no support from the corporals, no concern about our welfare, so fights start to happen - never for good reasons, just fights. And bullying is everywhere. Like, one kid terrorises my mate every night with psychological and physical abuse. When the staff find out, they let it happen anyway, sometimes right in front of them. Sometimes the fight is everybody against everyone - just a massive brawl.

I’m too ashamed to tell my dad any of this. I do tell the people in the welfare office but they just say it’ll all be over soon, which is no help at all. The platoon staff can see as plain as day that I’m in a depression but I don’t even get a ‘How are you?’ - not even once. And if the last time I knocked on their door they told me to f*** off, I’m not going to that door again anyway.

So I fall off. For the first time I think about ending my life, taking a weapon when we’re on the range and firing shots in my head. If I’d known I had a right to leave, I’d like to think that that option would have been on my mind before the option of killing myself.

The year’s training finishes with a week in Scotland - ‘battle camp’. I’m dead inside by this point, as are many other recruits, and yet by now we’re so indoctrinated, so used to the abuse, that the things that are about to happen won’t even seem wrong, just a bit more extreme than normal.

It all kicks off about half way through the week - bayonet training day. The corporals come into the hangar where we sleep and they're wild-eyed, screaming, shoving people out. A massive sergeant lifts a recruit in the air and literally throws him into the wall. A corporal smacks me full-force around the head - I’ve got my helmet on but he hits me so hard that I’m knocked right over, I mean this man’s about 40 and I’m maybe 17 by then. A bit later, we’re crawling through mud and a corporal grabs me and drags me along the ground, half-way across a field. When he lets go I’m in that much pain that I’m whimpering on the ground. When the other corporal, the one who hit me, sees me crying on the ground, he just points at me and laughs.

For the bayonet training itself, they tell us, ‘You’re gonna get f***ing angry - show me your war face!’ And they get us screaming: ‘Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill!’ The bombardier, who’s seen pictures of my girlfriend, tells me to imagine that she’s just over there being raped. He goes into intimate details about this rape fantasy, and then, shouting at me, he wants to know whether I’m going to do anything about it. And I’m so angry that there’s no more Joe any more - I scream and charge and stab my girlfriend’s attacker, this stuffed sack, with the bayonet.

When we’re done that day, I see these boys - even the worst of the bullies - sobbing, crying, falling apart all around me. We’re terrified, shot to bits. We’re still children. And the officer in charge, a major, has watched it all, saying nothing.

Back in Harrogate, on the morning of the pass-out parade I come into the bathroom. My mate’s stood by a mirror trying to sort his tie out, and I stand next to him and we’re dressed up real nice. ‘That’s it, we’ve done it,’ he says. And then he bursts into tears. And he sobs like I’ve not seen anyone cry before or since. It’s the whole experience of Harrogate that’s on him. The parade happens. The parents get a lot out of it. But as grand as it looks, it means nothing to me. 

When I go to Larkhill for my artillery training, I’m not sleeping, I’m getting nightmares. I tell an officer I want to leave. I’m maybe 17½ by this point, so I still have a right to leave though I don’t actually know that because I don’t know the terms of my contract. My request is ignored for a while, then one day at random I’m sent to see the Battery Sergeant Major. ‘Right,’ he says, ‘so you want to leave, right?’ ‘Yes, sir.’ And he says, ‘The army has spent a great deal of money on you. You’re going to stay here and complete your training and go to regiment.’ He just yells at me for wanting to leave. And then he threatens me with prison. ‘If you try to leave this camp,’ - if I try to run, he means - ‘we will find you and you will be put in prison. You are not leaving.’

So I do something I completely regret now - I fake an injury - it feels like the only thing I have left to do to get out. And at the same time my dad writes to the head of the camp saying he’s withdrawing his consent for me to remain. [In fact, a parent has no legal right to withdraw consent once it has been given.] Still I’m not allowed to go and my 18th birthday is fast approaching [the point at which the right of discharge comes to an end for the next four years]. But after I completely break down in a PT session, I’m dragged into an office and I say I just want to go home. And finally, a guy comes in, senior rank, and says, ‘You’re going home on Friday.’

I still have nightmares about Harrogate, but I’ve rebuilt my life. It made me angry, I was a horrible human being for a time - I’d turn on everyone. I got made homeless, I was living out of bin bags, I came to London with nothing. But I got into acting. Now I’ve started a theatre company, been directing plays, studying, wanting more from life. I realise that the chances of me having an ordinary life are long gone, so I might as well go for something extraordinary.”

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